“Not affiliated”

Six Muslim men were arrested in Cherry Hill, NJ for advancing a plot to blow up American soldiers at Ft. Dix. One Albanian, one Turk, one Jordanian, and three ethnic Albanians from Kosovo – called “Yugoslavs” by authorities, which is a bit like being “Soviet.” Three were in the U.S. illegally. The FBI said the men did not appear to be “affiliated” with al Qaeda, but that shouldn’t make you feel better.

Six Muslim men were arrested in Cherry Hill, NJ for advancing a plot to blow up American soldiers at Ft. Dix. One Albanian, one Turk, one Jordanian, and three ethnic Albanians from Kosovo – called “Yugoslavs” by authorities, which is a bit like being “Soviet.” Three were in the U.S. illegally. The FBI said the men did not appear to be “affiliated” with al Qaeda, but that shouldn’t make you feel better.

We have been down this road before. Without a clear association – like a confession – the FBI considers terrorist-like people and incidents to be unrelated to one another or anything else. Three Muslim men who purchased 1,000 cell phones and who were – according to Michigan authorities – targeting a 5-mile long bridge, were said by the FBI to have no “connection to a known terrorist group.” This despite the fact that cell phones have been used as detonators for bombs in Israel and Iraq, and the men carefully circumvented Wal-Mart’s limit on cell phone purchases by buying them in small batches.

“Sudden Jihad Syndrome” was invented by the FBI to explain why a Naveed Haq shot up the Seattle Jewish Federation; why Hesham Hadayet, an Egyptian with a history of radical statements, shot up the El Al ticket counter in LA; why Derek Shareef, a convert to Islam, planned to firebomb a mall in Rockford, IL; and why Sulejman Talovic, a Bosnian Muslim, killed five people in a shopping center in Salt Lake City. All normal guys until they weren’t; none “affiliated” with terror organizations.

But al Qaeda is not a country, a religion, an ethnicity or a fraternity to which one belongs. It is an ideology to which one ascribes. You don’t get a membership card or a passport and you can’t tell who they are by looking.

The Cherry Hill case is instructive. Al Qaeda has, in fact, been active in the Balkans, particularly in the former Yugoslavia – where a moderate, inclusive form of Islam was dominant until the wars of the 1990s combined with an influx of Saudi money plus Wahhabi ideology and fighters. Moderation of all sorts is under siege in the Balkans as the Dayton Accords that ended the fighting in 1997 are reaching their designated expiration date and the parties jockey for position in the aftermath. Kosovo and Macedonia are shaky, as is Albania next door. Serbia is threatening and Bosnia appears no more able to reconcile its ethnic/religious actors today than it was a decade ago. Russia is supporting the Serbs and the U.S. is supporting any moderates it can find – with the State Department approving the independence of Kosovo from Serbia.

With this as backdrop, the Cherry Hill arrests look different.

The FBI should be praised for the 10-month investigation that had them tracking the right people under the right circumstances. (And kudos to the Circuit City clerk who saw something wrong with copying a jihadi DVD and provided the tip authorities needed for the arrests.) We are grateful to them and safer because of them. But the analytical understanding that radical jihadi ideology binds people together in ways that may not be immediately evident is necessary for our continued security in this war that has permutations in our own country as well as abroad.